A Restaurant Find

We’ve been getting out every day, but the weather has remained coolish – 15°C seems cool to us now – and sometimes overcast. What’s going on here, you ask? Worry not, dear readers, great weather is returning to Valencia. Monday – today! – it’s supposed to be 20°C and sunny, Tuesday, 22°C and mostly sunny.

On Thursday, as planned, we headed back over to Rusaffa market for an actual shopping trip. We bought...some stuff, can’t remember exactly: Pink Lady apples from France (which we bought regularly and enjoyed last year when we were in France), sausages, little new potatoes. Oh, fresh strawberries from Valencia region, which are very tasty and perfectly ripe. We had to walk it home almost immediately because of the sausages, but meandered through Rusaffa on the way.

I went out again later in the day to buy oats and flax from the Herbolario Navarro, the upscale health food store five or six blocks away in the centre. The Spanish don’t seem to have bulk food stores like our Bulk Barn and Bulk Barrel. Navarro is more like the health food stores we occasionally shopped in France. They sell some items we would find in a bulk food store, but also lots of very esoteric “healthy” stuff of dubious benefit – supplements and such – as well as organic produce, baking and even wine.

The oats and flax I buy in bulk at home for pennies come in small sealed cellophane packages at Navarro – 500g of large-flake oats, 150g of flax – and cost a relative fortune, twice as much in Euros as they cost in dollars in Canada. One task for today is to research the possibility that there are bulk food stores somewhere in this city. (Later: alas, it appears not.)

Near city hall

I had taken my camera (as always) and after the shopping, drifted over to city hall square. The light was fantastic – heavy overcast in much of the sky, but still fairly bright. Given the colour and darkness of the clouds, you’d think a storm was imminent. Some rain was forecast, but as so often, never materialized. I wandered through to one of our favourite little squares, Plaza de Rodrigo Botet (he was a local fossil collector). It has a nice fountain, trees, restaurants, lovely yellow apartment buildings. A few snaps, and home.

City Hall square

Plaza de Rodrigo Botet

Later that evening, from our apartment

Friday is now officially lunch-out day. We had picked out one that Ines recommended, in Carmen, and headed over there a little before two (lunchtime opening hour typically). When we found it, and looked at the menu board, both our reactions were, ‘Meh.’ It was one of those restaurants that has to be inventive for the sake of invention, a smarty-pants restaurant. We just wanted good plain Spanish cooking. We found a real peach of a place a few blocks away near Plaza del Tossal.

Casa Paquito

Casa Paquito is a small, intimate restaurant, typically Spanish, with dark wood tables, colourful tile wainscotting and old Feria (fair) and bullfight posters on the wall. The crowd, when the place finally starting filling up a half hour later, was young-ish and Spanish. We were the only gringos. The menu del dia was €12 for starter, main, dessert, drink and bread, and there were choices of five or six dishes for each course. This is the kind of restaurant we came to love when we were here before. The food is never spectacular, but it’s often, as in this case, fresh, good quality and very tasty.

Karen had a big plate of salad to start, steak for main course – which she said was tender and flavourful – and a to-die-for chocolate tort for desert. The glass of wine she ordered was twice the portion you’d get most places, and quite decent quality. I ordered a beer, which was a mistake as the glass held not much more than Karen’s wine. I had garbanzo soup, which reminded me a little of French Canadian Pea (hambone in the broth, I’m guessing), a lightly breaded scaloppini of chicken breast with a few fries and hunter sauce, and baked apple for dessert. Very satisfying.

Total bill with the extra glass of wine I ordered: €26, about $42. How much would that meal cost at home? Hard to say; it’s apples and oranges. A Canadian restaurant would serve more veg with the main, and the portions would all be at least half again as big. But we were quite satisfied and barely ate anything later in the day.

Carmen Church front

Feeling fairly mellow, we meandered through Carmen, snapping pics of the street art (well, that would be me; Karen would be the one standing half a block away, looking embarrassed). We ended back home by 5:30, had a long Skype (two hours!) with Caitlin, then settled in for an evening at home. My, how unusual!

If Friday is lunch-out day, Saturday and Sunday are free-museum days. On Saturday, we decided to take in the new exhibit at MuVIM, the Valencian Museum of Modernity and Illustration, which is only a few blocks away. It’s an interesting place, a massive, modern, arguably brutalist, building on the edge of the old centre, with lovely grounds dotted with remnants of Roman buildings. The museum has a permanent exhibit, The Adventure of Thought, about the rise of the Age of Enlightenment. It’s an unlikely Disney-ish tour through several rooms and levels, complete with sound, video, live actors and animatronics. We went the last time we stayed here. You have to call ahead and book an appointment to see it in English. Most of the rest of the facility is given over to art exhibition spaces. (I noticed this time, though, that they also have a concert hall, and are currently running a series of free classical concerts.)

Republican poster promoting foreign sales of local crop

The exhibit we saw was "La Modernitat Republicana: Innovacions yPerviviències en l'Art Figuratiu (1928-1942)" – that’s in Valencian, which Google translates as Republican Modernity: Innovations and Survival in Figurative Art. It’s about figurative art in Valencia, most but not all commercial or propagandistic, during the politically tumultuous period from the end of the Miguel Primo de Rivera dictatorship, through the short-lived Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of the Franco era. Much of the nuance in the ideas was lost on us unfortunately because there was no English commentary (and also because the Spanish commentary which we tried to read appeared to be written in dense curator-ese, aka baffle-gab.) Never mind. We liked much of the art, especially the Civil War-era posters.

After the museum we wandered a bit in the narrow little streets in behind the museum. I wanted Karen to see some of the street art I had photographed the week before when I was out on my own. I’m beginning to think my initial judgement about the quality of recent street art here was premature. There is some pretty cool stuff, and still lots of it, because there are still lots of hoardings, blank walls and hidden little alleyways where the artists can work uninterrupted.

On Sunday, I went for a run. I picked up a bike on Ramon y Cajal, the wide boulevard a few blocks from our apartment, rode to the river, then jogged about three kilometers around to Marques del Turia, another wide boulevard that goes back into the centre. It was a 5K run altogether, with another kilometer or so of walking to get home.

The river park was full of people, including lots of families: picnicking, biking, jogging – zooming by me as if I were standing still – and playing sports. I saw a couple of soccer games but also, a little surprisingly, a rugby match. The river park system is fantastic. I ran along a purpose-built hard-packed crushed-tile jogging path. There is also a separate bike path and more than one walking path. Each has a different activity-appropriate surface. They take fitness and recreation very seriously here.

On the way to IVAM - Bridge of Flowers

Green parrot (presumably not native) in Turia Gardens

Ancient coke bottle cap in ruins in Turia Gardens

In the afternoon, we walked by a fairly indirect route – out to the river and then around much of the same route I’d run in the morning, only in the other direction – to IVAM, the Valencian Museum of Modern Art. It’s another fabulous institution, housed in another striking modern building on the edge of the old centre. At any one time, it’s showing three to five different exhibits. Right now, there’s a long-running show, drawn from its own collection, of sculpture by Julio González, a Spanish artist of international stature. IVAM has the largest collection of his work anywhere. There’s an exhibit of work by Grete Stern, a mid-20^th century Argentinian photographer of German extraction, and another of work by Harun Farocki, an Indo-German film maker and installation artist who died young a couple of years ago.

The one we saw, “Between Myth and Fright: The Mediterranean as Conflict,” just opened. Like the MuVIM exhibit we saw the day before, it’s a show that explores ideas through art. The first part considers the links and commonalities among Mediterranean cultures, and looks at the 19^th and early 20^th century idea of the Mediterranean as a mysterious, magical, mainly benign force. The second part explores the more modern take on the middle sea as a theatre of conflict, especially focusing on migrants and refugees from south and east. The first part is mostly paintings, the second mostly photos and videos.

Photo of Athens from IVAM exhibit

This was not an art-for-art’s-sake type of exhibit; few of the works on display were conventionally beautiful, and some of the videos struck us as more documentary than art. There is one long piece, for example, featuring a Tuareg (North African nomad) man talking to the camera about his life and work in people moving – not people smuggling, he insists, because he doesn’t move people across borders. It’s a bracing exhibit. And IVAM is a tri-lingual institution – Spanish, Valencian and English – so everything is translated which makes it a bit easier for the language impaired. And the commentary, even in translation, made more sense than most curatorial commentaries.

We walked home through Carmen and the city centre. End of weekend. End of post.